A garage door opener connects a garage door, such as a sectional, roll-up door, to a motor drive system. Energizing a motor of the motor drive system moves up or down the door, thus opens or closes the door. The motor is generally controlled remotely, which may be by a hand-held or other portable device or controlled through a wall-mounted control panel, among others. A door generally cannot be forced to move against the motor drive system, whether to open or close the door.
However, for safety or emergency, such as due to power failure or malfunctioning of the garage door opener, it is desirable and often required by industry standard to allow manual opening or closing of the door. An emergency release mechanism is provided for this purpose. The emergency release mechanism allows a person to disengage the door from the motor drive system, thus allowing the manual opening or closing of the door. When there is power outage or malfunction of a garage door opener, a person can use the emergency release to disengage the garage door from the motor drive system, and then open or close the door manually during emergency.
However, this could create a security threat to home owners. The emergency release usually involves a lever having a cord connected thereto, pulling down on this cord would disengage the door from the motor drive system and the door would be able to move freely. For a determined theft, it is not difficult to reach this release cord or lever from outside the garage door using a thin and long object, such as a hanger, inserted through a gap between the garage door and its frame, and then by grabbing the cord (or simply grabbing the lever) and pulling down the hanger to disengage the emergency release. The door then can be opened from the outside.
To address this safety concern, there are aftermarket safety devices available on the market that would prevent theft from opening a garage door from the outside. Examples of such devices include electronics door locks, which works like a deadbolt for the garage door opener. But this can be expensive and difficult to install.
It is therefore desirable to have a garage door opener that includes an anti-theft feature as part of the garage door opener, without any add-on device. It is an object of the present invention to mitigate or obviate at least one of the above mentioned disadvantages.